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Does this story make tool creating and wielding cockatoos official fact? Cockatoo owners have been talking about these kinds of things for ages and have even provided hard evidence, only to be completely dismissed out of hand by scientists who "know" that cockatoos are mere stupid animals.

This will probably be written off as yet another anomaly, an extreme exception to the notion held dear by science--that animals are too stupid to do smart things, a view curiously inherited by science's veritable nemesis, mainstream religion.

Science must discard it's old notions, prejudices and preconceptions, viewing the world through it's own version of rose-coloured glasses. It must stop filtering out, rejecting whatever does not conform to it's prejudices and start observing objectively, fairly.

There's one CLEC in the western US that provides dialup service to ISP's that also intercepts search requests, forwards the search to Yahoo, etc., and alters the search engine returns by changing links and inserting ads. You'd never know what was happening unless you were watching the traffic on the port and noticed that DNS was returning the same IP address for all the search engines.

Patenting software is a tremendous gamble, given the vast and ever-increasing amount of prior art that exists. There is far too much prior art for anyone to be aware of it all. But patent applicants forge on, sometimes rewording claims to obscure the fact that they are obvious or prior art but never giving up on the dream to see their name on an official US government patent and dreaming of all the millions and millions they'll make from the resulting monopoly, only to find their claims rejected and often whole patents voided on reexamination.

Software should not be patentable. Among other reasons, this is a field fraught with traps and pitfalls that even the most experienced cannot help but fall into. Also, it is so risky that patent insurance, if at all available, costs far more than the patent is worth.

There seems to be a popular notion that there is no difference between sending a video as a file and sending as a stream because bytes is bytes is bytes. Though it seems a reasonable opinion, it is still not a valid assumption. IP wasn't designed for streaming media or any other real-time communication. Streaming is an inefficient use of IP resources that disproportionately degrades network performance. Empirical observations of network data flow and traffic with and without real-time streaming support that conclusion. Gigabit rates will not increase the efficiency of streaming over IP. Instead, it is more likely to make networks slower, in part due to the misconception that fatter pipes means more streaming capacity.

The smartest ways to broadcast media in real time is to use technologies designed for it: Broadcast TV, radio, cable, PSTN. Using IP networks is just plain stupid.

Besides, what good reason is there to stream recorded media in real time? It is not live-as-it-happens. It's like buying a film movie frame by frame and watching it as you receive the frames from the store. Makes absolutely no sense.

And now what will become of the Elephant's Child? Keeping non-robotic entities out of the stacks will serve only to starve it to death.

Exploring the depths of the library stacks is one of the last and more refined civilised expressions of human hunter-gatherer instincts, where one can find even that which she didn't know she was looking for.

Serendipity is at the foundation of discovery and new knowledge. We become less than what we are when it is denied us.

But your bank, credit card companies, et cetera, will be very happy to dump the authentication burdens and liabilities on someone else. Then, when someone steals your money, credit or services, it's not their fault.

Pretty much everything in security & authentication that comes from government has inevitably proven to be crap in the wild. Their stuff only "works" within controlled conditions, behind closed doors and with strictly limited access. Government blessed private and proprietary scams are far more concerned with the money than the security.

A lot of black hats are likely praying for this scam to get underway. And when it does become official, there will likely be a run on rubber sheets.

According to the article there was no measurement made of the magnetic field. Rather, the strength of the magnetic field was calculated by observing and measuring something else and then plugging that data into a model which then calculated the strength of the magnetic field. Regardless of the degree of confidence in the calculation, it is still not a measurement and it's crap science to call it that.

they're talking about stacking the dice, not the devices. You know what dice are? They're the little chips of silicon that are then packaged to make the IC's that you typically see and use. Unless you can precisely align and drill little tiny microscopic holes in the dice and electrically connect the one on top to the one on bottom, then you haven't been doing what they're doing. Not even close.

The closest anyone has ever got to this is stacking small dice on a larger die and wire bonding the pads of one to the other.

Interesting that TSV is found to be useful after all. 29 years ago an AMD employee independently conceived of TSV and AMD refused to talk to the employee about this and other concepts, nearly all of which have subsequently been developed and patented by AMD's competitors.